1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a portable teleconference phone system, and particularly to a method for forming a teleconference implementing Bluetooth technology in electronic devices having internal microphones.
2. Description of Background
Modern business makes heavy use of voice teleconferencing in order to collaborate with coworkers who are located at other sites. In a typical teleconferencing scenario, several (e.g., 5-15) people gather together in a conference room and around a conferencing system and dial into a teleconference number that remote participants can phone into to hear the proceedings. Unfortunately, the quality of the voice communication is often very poor, especially in larger meetings. Much time is wasted by people asking questions, such as “Can you move closer to the microphone?”, “Please repeat that.”, “I could not hear what you just said.”, “Who's speaking?”, etc. Often, the remote participants simply give up.
The standard piece of office equipment used for voice teleconferencing is a speakerphone with an integrated microphone or several satellite mikes. For example, Polycom (see http://polycom.com/home/) makes a popular family of teleconferencing phones. The microphones in those phone systems may be connected to the main phone either by wires or wireless technology. In either case, the participants hear the conversation through speakers, and talk through shared microphones on the conference table. The remote participants experience a quality that is dependent on how close the person speaking is to the microphone. However, the microphones can be costly. Moreover, the number of available microphones is often insufficient to pick up all of the participants, particularly any “soft-spoken” participants around the conference table. Furthermore, for teleconferencing phones that have attachable microphones, the wires extending from the microphones and to the teleconferencing phone system can easily get tangled up when the microphones are passed around the conference table, thereby causing microphones to be disconnected from the teleconferencing phone system.